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Memories of her political honeymoon, when she grasped the Liberal mantle amid Dalton McGuinty’s decline, are long forgotten. Today, barely one in five voters supports her as premier.

So is she done like Dalton?

Not so fast, Wynne counters, taken aback by the question.

“We’re in the middle of a four-year mandate — we’re in the middle of implementing a very important plan,” she begins.

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“And I’m going to be running in 2018.”

Interviewed in her Queen’s Park office, Wynne is philosophical about her determination to reconnect with Ontario voters. They gave her a majority two years ago, and she needs two more years to make her case.

With the province on a roll, it shouldn’t be that hard: Ontario’s economic growth looks set to lead the country. Unemployment keeps trending down. Economists agree the budget deficit will disappear next year. A promised pension for every Ontario worker is taking shape, and free tuition is coming to more postsecondary students.

Despite all those positive measures, one metric — Wynne’s performance rating — remains stubbornly depressed. Are Ontarians tiring of her after three years in power, ready for a change after 13 years of Liberal rule — or both?

It didn’t help Wynne’s public standing that she persisted in defending our indefensible election financing rules until a Star exposé prompted her to introduce badly needed reforms this month. Her leaden handling of the fundraising fiasco suggested a disconnect — the premier cosying up to big corporate and union donors despite her carefully cultivated image as a grassroots political reformer.

Wynne now concedes her slow response misjudged the public’s appetite for change.

“I acknowledge that the public discussion kind of came at a time when we hadn’t moved as far as we might have,” she says. “Could we have moved sooner? Yes, we could have. I’m glad we’re moving now, and we’re going to get it done.”

The fundraising debate may also have fed into a general public perception, carefully exploited by the opposition parties, that the government lacks clean hands: The lingering controversy over cancelled gas-fired power plants — dating from the 2011 election, revived in the 2014 campaign, and sure to be repeated in 2018 — still hangs over the Liberal brand. She is mindful of how the attacks from the new PC leader, Patrick Brown, are playing.

“I haven’t gotten to this point in my political life by underestimating the opposition,” she muses. “That’s their prerogative to use that kind of negativity.”

Part of Wynne’s frustration is that she has unveiled a number of progressive measures that have brought her little political credit but yielded considerable public flak.

The Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) is perhaps the country’s boldest social reform of recent years, launched after Ottawa and the provinces failed to move on a badly needed enhancement of the existing Canada Pension Plan. Wynne will discuss CPP reform Thursday with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, but says the process has yet to produce the required “miracle,” meaning “it’s full steam ahead on ORPP.”

Despite all these measures — or perhaps because of them — Wynne isn’t winning popularity points. In political terms, introducing so many targeted reforms may strike voters as a grab bag, while the more ambitious pension and carbon pricing plans have aroused opposition from special interests in the business sector that drown out constituencies supporting environmental and social change.

All of which pose an undeniable political challenge to Wynne as she attempts to revive her diminished public standing at the mid-term mark. With two years until the next election — admittedly an eternity, especially in provincial politics — will she grow on voters, or will they grow ever more weary of her?

A major cabinet shuffle is coming next month to put a fresh face on a tired front bench. But the real remedy for Wynne is to publicly identify her political legacy — no, it can’t be beer and wine in grocery stores — and unveil a vision for the future.

Wynne wants to be known as a builder — laying down infrastructure, but also investing in the building blocks of education, the passion she says drew her into politics: “That’s the motivator for me.”

Two years down. Two years left. At which point we’ll see whether Wynne, a fiercely competitive politician, wins the four more years she wants.

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